Edinburgh Napier University

  The recent but rapid adoption of networked audio systems such as RedNet within the commercial and education domains is, as yet, limited to Local Area Networks (LANs) or Campus Area Networks (CANs). However, the increased connection bandwidth offered to individuals and studios by Internet Service Providers is opening up the potential for audio and video-based remote collaboration in the arts. The commercial opportunity this bandwidth and performance improvement presents can be evidenced by collaboration-focused tools such as Source-Connect and by the new cloud-based workflows in Pro-Tools 12. Neither of these are real-time however, and incur latency times measured in seconds rather than the tens of milliseconds we require when musicians actually play together. To see where we might end up given sufficient network performance we need only to look at research using the high-speed National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) found in many countries. These networks offer speed and jitter performance far in excess of their commonly available commercial counterparts and they allow us to do research and to develop collaborative practices that will ultimately be available to us all once the commercial networks achieve similar levels of performance.